students and statistics

In this study, authors Brammer and Rees try to quantify a notoriously unquantitative process. They attempt to measure subjectivity, something only a social constructivist would attempt. They attempt to measure what any expressivist or sane person would only try to describe in qualitative terms, if they tried at all.
The authors do make an interesting point when they point out that peer review, a staple of expressivist-introduced process, now occupies the same ubiquitousness in the classroom that the current-traditional approach once did. As such, it has become a matter of faith among teachers—a faith that is shared occasionally by students 31.1 percent of the time and usually shared 32.6 percent of the time.
I don’t have anything against a scientific point of view. Science and mathematics are subtle tools for understanding the world and the mind. Science is about measuring and being objective, quantifying data. I don’t even mind pseudo-science that imaginatively explores some aspect of the inner and outer universe in quantitative and qualitative terms--as long as it is done as a matter of arousing wonder and speculation. But this article did bother me for what I saw as a presumptuous use of quantitative terms to make qualitative judgments.
I didn’t mind the authors’ interpreting the data as saying that students who had been schooled in how to respond in peer review were more prone to view the process favorably. But the classification of responses into the categories of satisfactory and unsatisfactory (since it was a scientific study, they didn’t use “good” and “bad”) was problematic. I think it has to do with the number of students (20%) who “would not participate in peer review if were not required—even though they found it helpful.” That would seem to cast doubt on the categories of satisfactory and unsatisfactory. The student who said that “Peers never seemed to be willing to be open and give honest feedback” was “coded as negative.” But maybe he gave that response because he had begun to suspect that he wasn’t being honest and open with them—the value of peer review may have been that it made the student’s dishonesty with himself a little closer to awareness. This isn’t to say that students should be forced to do what they don’t like—I’m only saying that quantifying subjective reactions is an unscientific process. And how the authors could conclude that the statistics show that we "need more emphasis on peer review as a global activity" is beyond me.